character development

Compendium (part four)

Leadership Courage Series # 38 We’re reviewing nine traits essential to lead effectively in a Church caught in a culture of cowardice.   Three: Promote healthy differentiation within the church or system you lead. Healthy differentiation means to take full responsibility for your own being and destiny.  Pastor, this means that you will discard the ministerial […]

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Compendium (part three)

Leadership Courage Series # 37 We’re making a brief, final lap through nine traits called for from pastors and influencers in the Church in North America.  The second is: Take full responsibility for your own emotional being and destiny. Pastor, more than you know, you are the model of what maturity in Christ is.  Regardless

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Go First! (part six)

Leadership Courage Series # 34 Last time, I used the phrase “do what’s right because it’s right, whether it works or not.”  I learned this from a friend, who says he learned it from the Lord.  His wife had lost both her parents to cancer. One after the other.  Suddenly.  Unexpectedly. The impact was devastating. 

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Go First! (part three)

Leadership Courage Series # 31  We’re looking at a ninth characteristic of courageous Christian leadership.  A leader moves.  She takes action.  Rather than taking a straw poll to see what the prevailing opinions are, a leader will go first.  And sometimes this means going alone… for a while. It’s nothing special. It what leaders do.

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The Unreasonableness of Being Reasonable (part two)

Leadership Courage Series # 26 Edwin Friedman in his stellar work A Failure of Nerve challenges his readers to “disengage from an unreasonable faith in reasonableness.” It seems that the Church in North America is reasonable if it is anything, and that reasonableness has got us stuck. “Syncretism” is what scholars call it. I call

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Undermine the 80/20 Rule (part three)

Leadership Courage Series # 24 Here’s a final look at the 80/20 Rule and its connection to the culture of cowardice in the North American Church.  And, it may be hard to hear. Could it be that a distorted substitute for biblical grace has taken the Church? Consider how little the Church asks of Christians…

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Undermine the 80/20 Rule (part two)

Leadership Courage Series # 23 We’re looking at another characteristic of the culture of cowardice that’s become normative in North American Christianity: the 80/20 Rule is flourishing!  As senior pastor, elder, or lay leader, what can you do to Undermine the 80/20 Rule in your congregation? One: Think like a people-developer, not a gatherer of

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Undermine the 80/20 Rule

Leadership Courage Series # 22 Why is it that 20% of the people in our churches are doing all the giving, all the serving, all the ministry? What if we who lead have actually established the culture that reinforces 80/20? What are we communicating such that the vast majority of church dwellers feel great about

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The Adventurous Life #3

Why is it that the Christian life is such an adventure? What has your experience been, following hard after God, as best you know? In my life, I repeatedly find myself in dilemmas that are completely beyond my ability.  This was far less common before I surrendered my life to Christ.  Now, it seems, the

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